A resume enables a jobseeker to articulate his or her skills and experiences in ways relevant to particular job opportunities. Resumes are scanned and sorted by recruiters or employers manually or using automated systems to determine relevancy of candidates for a particular position the employer is seeking to fill. Candidates possessing top-ranked resumes are the ones that get called for subsequent interviews. There is no surprise then that it is common practice for jobseekers to focus or customize the content of their resumes based on the nature of the jobs they are interested in so that the resume is more relevant for purposes of employer screenings.
The problem is that there is no system designed to enable content focusing of a resume based on the requirements of a particular job. Existing systems range from word processors to web-based resume builders that enable users to compose or build a single, general or all-purpose resume. The level of customization supported by such existing systems is usually directed only to applying different formatting styles or changing the look and feel of the resume automatically.
The approach that most jobseekers use for focusing their resume is to use one of the existing systems to build a resume, then make a copy of that resume and edit it to manually remove, add or paraphrase content based on what the user perceives is relevant or not for that job opportunity based on their understanding of the job description. Users that follow this process end up having several different resumes which they then use to copy relevant content from and paste into a new resume for a particular job, making focusing a resume tedious and time-consuming.
Yet another problem is the qualitative nature of resume reviews. As a result of the ambiguity for jobseekers in how employers perceive resumes, a large number of jobseekers count on reviewers and resume writers (i.e., humans) to suggest content changes in their resume so that it is more focused for the job or position type they are after. The suggestions of different resume reviewers, who in turn basically perform similar objective processes as jobseekers, typically generate inconsistent results.